In a low-point for American democracy, the easily-offended citizens of this nation have directed their wrath at Google's painfully-innocent Valentine's Day doodle. The "edgy" 1-minute animation shows a boy and girl fall in love, followed by a 5-second collage of couples embracing including at least one gay couple (we can't be sure about the genders of the puppy-kitty and milk-cookie pairs). Zut alors!

Though you can only see the gay couple for 3 seconds, that's plenty enough time for the professionally-honed gaydar of Newsbuster's Tim Graham, who chastises the "PC-approved" animation for its gay agenda-setting ways. "Valentine's Day is a big day that gay-left advocates expect their love to be honored as just the same," says Graham, the director of media analysis for the conservative media watchdog group. "The Washington Post's Valentine story today made sure to include gay couples, and so does today's Google doodle, at the end of an animated video about a boy and a girl jumping rope."

It's pretty sad that Graham's day job as "media analysis" director is reduced to grousing about cartoon images of tuxedoed men and drumming up paranoia about a tech company spreading a secret gay agenda.

Unfortunately, the displays of feigned outrage don't end here. It appears the cutesy imagery of a princess falling in love with a frog and a cookie jump-roping with a carton of milk has caused others to imply that Google is associating same sex love with bestiality or worse—dessert-on-beverage fraternization!

"The collage itself seems to undermine Google’s assumed message," writes Josh Wolford at Web Pro News. "Placing the same sex couple(s) next to a princess-frog couple and an alien-astronaut couple is an odd choice. Is the same sex couple to be thought of in the same way as fictional couples that don’t really exist?" Wolford concedes the move "likely wasn't intentional."

At this point, it's probably just better to bring in the artist of this painfully-scrutinized cartoon to explain to us why he's a radical gay agenda-pushing influence peddler who happens to bigotedly equate gay love with bestiality. Oh, it appears his name is Michael Lipman and he's given an interview with the Washington Post.What sayeth this agenda-pushing monster?

“The animation alludes to that universality [of love]" he told Comics Riff blogger Michael Cavna. “These characters are archetypes, with no dialogue, so it can play around the world." Of his inspiration, Lipman adds, "That was every girl I met up until college ... The little girl who couldn’t see the magic within [me] — she had many faces.”

Can we give this a rest now?

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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